During oral reading, the eyes tend to be ahead of the voice (eye-voice span, EVS).
It has been hypothesized that the extent to which this happens depends on the
automaticity of reading processes, namely on the speed of print-to-sound conversion.
We tested whether EVS is affected by another automaticity component – immunity
from interference. To that end, we manipulated word familiarity (high-frequency, lowfrequency,
and pseudowords, PW) and word length as proxies of immunity from
interference, and we used linear mixed effects models to measure the effects of both
variables on the time interval at which readers do parallel processing by gazing at word
N C 1 while not having articulated word N yet (offset EVS). Parallel processing was
enhanced by automaticity, as shown by familiarity length interactions on offset EVS,
and it was impeded by lack of automaticity, as shown by the transformation of offset EVS
into voice-eye span (voice ahead of the offset of the eyes) in PWs. The relation between
parallel processing and automaticity was strengthened by the fact that offset EVS
predicted reading velocity. Our findings contribute to understand how the offset EVS, an
index that is obtained in oral reading, may tap into different components of automaticity
that underlie reading ability, oral or silent. In addition, we compared the duration of the
offset EVS with the average reference duration of stages in word production, and we
saw that the offset EVS may accommodate for more than the articulatory programming
stage of word N.

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The Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics is an institute of the German Max Planck Society. Our mission is to undertake basic research into the psychological,social and biological foundations of language. The goal is to understand how our minds and brains process language, how language interacts with other aspects of mind, and how we can learn languages of quite different types.